Media Mentions

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. 2015 was supposed to be the year President Barack Obama would use unilateral executive action to accomplish major goals of his administration that had been blocked by Congress: relaxing deportations, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and restricting access to guns. But all three goals stalled.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Over the last 15 years, Americans have become accustomed to distinguishing domestic mass shootings from Islamic terrorism -- the difference between Columbine and the Sept. 11 attacks, if you will. In 2015, that conceptual division broke down with the massacre in San Bernardino, California. It wasn’t the first domestic act of terrorism inspired by Islam -- Army Major Nidal Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood and the Boston Marathon bombing both featured American Muslim terrorists. But San Bernardino was the first time the two paradigms were literally indistinguishable. It’s as if the terrorists finally said, “Who needs airplanes when assault weapons are readily available?”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. Among Republicans, it has become politically correct to be politically incorrect. Actually that’s the most politically correct thing that you can possibly be. As soon as you announce that you’re politically incorrect, you’re guaranteed smiles and laughter, and probably thunderous applause. Proudly proclaiming your bravery, you’re pandering to the crowd. A math-filled new paper, by economists Chia-Hui Chen at Kyoto University and Junichiro Ishida at Osaka University, helps to explain what’s going on. With a careful analysis of incentive structures, they show that if self-interested people want to show that they are independent, their best strategy is to be politically incorrect, and to proclaim loudly that’s what they are being. The trick is that this strategy has nothing at all to do with genuine independence; it’s just a matter of salesmanship, a way to get more popular.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein. In just four years, the Behavioral Economics Oscars, widely known as the Becons, have become the most eagerly awaited of the year-end movie awards (even if the highly influential awards committee consists of just one person). Finally, the wait is over. A standing (and fully rational) ovation for the Becon winners of 2015:

...Coal needs all the friends it can get. The industry is under siege from federal regulation, most recently Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which went into effect on Oct. 23 and seeks to reduce carbon emissions by 32 percent by 2030. Consumers and activists, meanwhile, are persuading utilities to close aging coal-fired power plants. With funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has helped shut down more than 220 coal facilities over the past five years...Whitfield’s star witness was the well-known law professor Laurence Tribe of Harvard, who’s been retained by Peabody Energy, the nation’s largest coal company, to advocate against the EPA proposal. Arguing that the Obama administration was infringing on state authority, Tribe compared the Clean Power Plan to “burning the Constitution.” “If I thought the case was a close one, I wouldn’t have taken it on,” Tribe says. “If I’m proven right on the law, then lots of time, money, and jobs will have been lost pursuing an important goal in an unlawful way.”

For close to a century “The Bluebook” has reigned as the “bible of legal citation“*, the guide that practicing lawyers, judges and law students turn to when they need to know the proper way to reference a case, a statute, book or article. Now, a copyright clash is heating up between the Ivy League publishers of The Bluebook and legal activists who are preparing to post online what they describe as a simpler, free alternative to the manual’s punctilious precepts...Here’s an excerpt from the letter by IP litigator Peter M. Brody of Ropes & Gray LLP, who represents Harvard Law Review Association, Columbia Law Review Association, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review and the Yale Law Journal: [M]y client has been and remains concerned that the publication and promotion of such a work may infringe the Reviews’ copyright rights in The Bluebook and The Bluebook Online, and may cause substantial, irreparable harm to the Reviews and their rights and interests in those works.

What have been 2015’s most important developments in legal technology?...the biggest legal technology story of the year was the joint announcement by Harvard Law School and Ravel Law of their Free the Law project to digitize and make available to the public for free Harvard’s entire collection of U.S. case law – said to be the most comprehensive and authoritative database of American law and cases available anywhere outside the Library of Congress. As someone who has covered legal and information technology for more than two decades, this was a day I’d long hoped would arrive. Harvard’s vice dean for library and information resources, Jonathan Zittrain, summed up the significance better than I could when he said: “Libraries were founded as an engine for the democratization of knowledge, and the digitization of Harvard Law School’s collection of U.S. case law is a tremendous step forward in making legal information open and easily accessible to the public.”

A bit of last-minute skullduggery in Congress blocking efforts to make companies disclose political contributions may fall short of its goal. Buried in the 2,000 pages of the $1.1 trillion spending bill passed into law this month was one of those nasty little riders that has nothing to do with funding the government but are slipped into a must-pass bill at the last minute...The legal opinion written by Harvard Law Professor John Coates argues that this wording does not in the meantime restrict the preparatory tasks of issuing a rule — internal discussion, planning, investigation, analysis, evaluation and development of possible proposals. "These steps often take years and consume significant agency funds and other resources," Coates wrote in his Dec. 17 opinion.

The latest chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s career ended in November, when the Harvard Law School professor concluded his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. That effort centered on his campaign to reform Congressional politics. Prior to that, Prof. Lessig’s scholarship, teaching and activism focused on technology policy and the Internet. He has argued for greater sharing of creative content, the easing of restrictions in areas such as copyright, and the concept of Net Neutrality. Prof. Lessig, who founded the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, is the author of numerous books on technology, including “Code: and Other Laws of Cyberspace,” and “The Future of Ideas: the Fate of the Commons in a Connected World.” CIO Journal asked Prof. Lessig for his thoughts on how technology policy, which is at multiple critical junctures around the world, can and should evolve. Privacy, surveillance, and international governance of the Internet and telecommunications networks will approach milestones in 2016, with implications for business and beyond.

After researching the devastating humanitarian effects of the deadly cluster munitions used in Afghanistan in 2002, Bonnie Docherty joined a worldwide campaign to eliminate them. Six years after she started her probe, cluster bombs were banned. Her investigation on the use of cluster munitions in Afghanistan, and later in Iraq and Lebanon, was highly influential in a 2008 treaty signed by 117 countries banning these weapons. For Docherty, a lecturer on law and a senior instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School, the battle to protect civilians from unnecessary harm continues. Last month, Docherty traveled to Geneva to advocate for stronger regulations on incendiary devices, which she calls “exceptionally cruel weapons” that have been used in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Middle Easterners sometimes observe wryly that although the West causes some of their region’s problems, Westerners don’t have to suffer the consequences. In 2015, that observation ceased to be valid, at least with respect to Europe. The world’s collective failure to solve the multidirectional Syrian civil war led to a refugee crisis that affected Europe profoundly. The open European borders promised by the Schengen treaty are in the process of being sealed, and immigration is now widely acknowledged to threaten the future of the European Union itself. What’s noteworthy in historical terms about this blowback isn’t just that it shows how small the world is, or how vulnerable the EU is to external shocks. It’s that Europe hasn’t reacted by trying to solve the Syrian crisis in a serious way, by trying to change the actors’ incentives or the strategic calculus.

Donald Trump's call to ban Muslims from entering the United States has been widely derided as discriminatory, hateful and unworkable - never mind illegal. Many legal experts have said it's almost certainly unconstitutional. According to several scholars surveyed by MSNBC, while foreign citizens do enjoy fewer rights than Americans, it is still illegal for the government to use a religious test on foreigners. The Constitution's "bar against declaring an official religion" would apply to discrimination against non-citizens, argues Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe.

When he was in school on Long Island, N.Y., Yaseen Eldik `16 was just another kid. Then 9/11’s hijacked jets crashed into the twin towers, and life changed for the American-born Muslim. “I was called a terrorist and asked if my parents belonged to al-Qaida,” Eldik said. “Because of that experience — of feeling almost like an enemy of my community — I began to feel isolated.” In the wake of the November Paris attacks, the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., and an incessant anti-Muslim drumbeat from some U.S. presidential contenders, Eldik and other members of the Harvard Islamic community described what it’s like to live under the current wave of “Islamophobia” in America, one that Harvard Islamic Chaplain Taymullah Abdur-Rahman said has reversed years of healing since the 2001 calamities...Eldik recalls his own response to the hostility and fear he encountered after 9/11: He withdrew, something that today he thinks was a mistake. That’s why he and three other Muslim law students got together earlier this month and made a video, released online last week by the Harvard Muslim Law Students Association. The video urges Muslim youth not to hide if they encounter anti-Islamic sentiment, but to engage, share their experiences, and speak out.

During a speech to a conservative crowd in Iowa this month, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz leveled a heavy charge against his colleagues across the aisle in the U.S. Senate. Democrats, he said, attempted to eliminate Americans’ right to free speech with a proposed constitutional amendment last fall...“I have read the amendment carefully. It’s about raising and spending money in political campaigns — nothing more,” Harvard Law School constitutional law professor Laurence H. Tribe told us in an email. “It has no effect at all on freedom of the press, freedom of assembly or peaceful protest. It does not allow the government to punish people for speaking their minds.” Tribe also noted that he had Cruz, a Harvard Law graduate, in class. “Ted Cruz earned an A in my constitutional law course at Harvard, and I am a tough grader!” Tribe said. “I’m confident Ted knows his statement is false. No lawyer or student who can read English believes what Ted Cruz claimed to believe.”

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is free to continue planning rules requiring corporate disclosure of political spending despite passage of Republican-backed budget language prohibiting the agency from using 2016 dollars to finalize, issue or implement such a policy, a Harvard scholar's Tuesday legal opinion says. The opinion, offered by Harvard Law School professor John C. Coates IV, differentiates between planning for such a rule and finalizing, issuing or implementing it.

A Waltham law firm used unfair and deceptive practices to collect debts from hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts consumers in recent years, in one instance taking out a civil arrest warrant against a 90-year-old woman, Attorney General Maura Healey alleged in a complaint filed this week in Suffolk Superior Court. The firm, Lustig, Glaser & Wilson PC, has filed 100,000 lawsuits against Massachusetts residents and collected more than $110 million from them since 2011, preying on some of the state’s poorest people, Healey alleged in court documents...Roger Bertling, director of the Consumer Protection Clinic at Harvard Law School, said that the practices alleged by Healey and the consumer protection agency are fairly common. “Debt-collection work is still the wild, wild West,” he said. “The system is built on volume and getting in and getting out very quickly.”

An op-ed by Lucian A. Bebchuk and Robert J. Jackson Jr. The omnibus budget agreement adopted by Congress includes a provision that prevents the Securities and Exchange Commission from issuing a rule next year that would require public companies to disclose their political spending. This unusual Congressional intervention in S.E.C. rule-making is a troubling development both for investors and for the agency.

The FDA is easing its restrictions on gay and bisexual men who want to make a blood donation. But there's a catch -- the lifetime ban is being replaced with a new policy that requires gay and bisexual men to abstain from sex for a year before being able to donate. Harvard Law professor Glenn Cohen joins CBSN with more on the legal issues that could result.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Reviewing the year at the U.S. Supreme Court, there’s no question that the outstanding historic moment was June’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, in which the court recognized -- or, if you prefer, invented -- a right to gay marriage. There was nothing substantively surprising about the decision itself. Justice Anthony Kennedy had been preparing the way for 20 years, melding the principles of equality and due process into a jurisprudence of “equal dignity.” What’s surprising is the lack of sustained national opposition to the decision. In the contentious, circuslike Republican primary campaign, there has thus far been astonishingly little discussion of Obergefell and how to combat it or roll it back.

An op-ed by Susan Crawford. In Boston, September 1 is known as “Moving Day,” and it can be hell on wheels. On that day each year, more than half of the city’s leases turn over and students return to campus, disgorging thousands of moving vans into the streets at once. It’s an annual nightmare for residents and local officials charged with keeping the city running smoothly. But this year, something remarkable happened that not only took out much of the pain — it also showcased how technology can be successfully harnessed to address deceptively complex government customer service problems. The hero was Boston’s IT department, rising from its traditional roots to do what smart, connected corporations do all the time — employing cutting-edge tech to solve problems.

An op-ed by Noah Feldman. Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God, as Pope Francis and suspended Wheaton College professor Larycia Hawkins affirm? Or are Allah and the Christian deity two different things, as the Wheaton administration believes? The debate is a throwback to the days when evangelical Protestants and Catholics were deeply at odds on a range of theological questions. It only seems surprising because Roe v. Wade began a process of political rapprochement between American evangelicals and Catholics that makes them appear closer than they really are. But the debate is also a major issue for Jewish-Christian relations. If Christians and Muslims don’t worship the same God, then neither do Christians and Jews.